Melbourne is a busy city these days - get used to it

By Julie Szego

3 April 2018 — 2:16pm

We want the lifestyle of an international city ... without the crowds.

Last week I was booked on a Monday morning plane to Sydney for work. I chose the vaguely civilised 9.15am flight because early mornings do not agree with me. As we know, a trip to Tullamarine in peak hour requires strategic aforethought; I planned to leave home in East St Kilda at 7.15am, and given I had no luggage to check-in, arrive at the airport with enough time for a coffee strong enough to bring on cardiac arrhythmia in less hardy types and a read of the day’s news.

Maybe you can guess where this is heading? My battle plan was blown out by 15 minutes and so I found myself in a barely-moving cab on Queens Road, listening to a panel of radio personalities lacerating Australia’s cheating cricketers. My driver, Omar, was resourceful, though. He poked at the GPS — “these new ones tell us a lot more about what the traffic’s doing” — swerved around to St Kilda Road, zigzagged through the side streets of South Melbourne and cut back to Kings Way, bypassing the blockage. Figuring there was still just enough time for breakfast, I rushed into the Qantas domestic terminal to behold — all of Melbourne. That’s what it felt like.

Just another Monday at the airport ...

The queue at baggage security snaked to the terminal exit. A half hour passed. And then some. We watched the flights creeping up the monitor. I gave up hope of a caffeine hit, twitching in withdrawal. I nearly gave up hope of catching my plane until a staff member, his voice barely audible above the commotion, called for the Sydney 9.15am passengers to step forward.

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(And then we sat on the tarmac for an hour and a quarter because a suitcase couldn’t be matched with a passenger, but that’s another story.)

Morning in Melbourne is always busy. Melbourne is always busy — that’s what we say now, our small talk all about our big city and its daily irritations. Swaying on our feet in a packed tram when it shouldn’t be this crowded, circling for a parking spot when it shouldn’t be this busy, queuing at the supermarket and can you believe yet another apartment block is going up down the street.

“Did you watch that Four Corners episode on population growth?” one of the mothers at after-school swimming asked me recently, “It freaked me out so much I couldn’t sleep all night.”

Sports fans crowd a tram stop at the corner of Collins and Spencer streets.Credit:Paul Jeffers

We’re having one of those “debates” about population again, debates partly ignited by activists who claim a conspiracy of silence surrounds the topic. The Turnbull government has trimmed Australia’s permanent migration program. Middling Australia proponents from Tony Abbott leftwards urge we slash immigration — given we can’t actually curb population growth without forced sterilisation or compulsory euthanasia — until infrastructure and housing stock “catch up”. On current projections, by mid-century Melbourne and Sydney will each have roughly 8 million people, becoming, according to Infrastructure Australia chief Philip Davies, “of the scale of global cities like London or Hong Kong”.

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To this we say, rightly: then give us London’s vast and efficient public transport system, unclog the roads, offer the time-poor residents in the outer suburbs an alternative to driving to work. Otherwise, don’t we fancy ourselves a bit London and New York already? Isn’t our transformation during the past 20 years of breakneck population growth just a bit exhilarating? Melbourne’s world-class dining scene — spreading far beyond the CBD and spicing up the middle-ring suburbs — its world-class graffiti art, world-class hospitals and scientific research centres, the architectural gems around RMIT’s thriving city campus, the packed calendar of festivals, blockbuster exhibitions and sporting events. A healthy jobs market; there’s a good chance our children won’t need to move interstate or overseas for work. A meaningful local media — for its continuing existence, however precarious, we can also thank population growth. An expectation — an entitlement! — to the perfect cup of coffee.

I’m not letting any government off the hook for short-termism and woeful infrastructure planning, nor am I setting up false dichotomies. But surely part of the reason politicians don’t level with us about the scale of our urban challenge is that we want it both ways, taking for granted the benefits of a global city while expecting our “Australian way of life” to persist unmolested.

Are we truly ready for a London-style congestion tax or car-pooling regime? We continue to resist policies nudging us towards a more sustainable and equitable style of living, with smaller dwellings and more urban density: the sheer volume of residential planning objections keeps VCAT members in work and cynical state oppositions jumping on bandwagons. People still whinge they can’t get a seat on a peak-hour train — how funny would that sound to someone in Tokyo? To change register slightly, how would someone in a less privileged part of the world view Australia’s space and wealth against our smug belief that the numbers we take in will always be our prerogative?

And would a Londoner expect to sail through security at Heathrow on a Monday morning, as I did— with self-centred cluelessness — last week in Melbourne?